Friday, September 10, 2004

Give Till It Hurts

UPDATE: The highly inquisitive Avedon directs us to another simple question, this one posed by Michael Froomkin of Discourse.net:

We know that nobody ever came forward to claim the $10,000 reward offered "If you personally witnessed George W. Bush reporting for drills at Dannelly Air National Guard Base between the months of May and November of 1972". But how come no one has ever asked GW himself if he can name one person he trained with? That’s what Texans for Truth wants to know. And they have a slick ad featuring Robert Mintz, who served in Alabama’s 187th Air National Guard during the period that Lt. Bush perfected the art of invisibility.

I can name people I worked with in summer jobs 20 years ago (30 years ago I was in high school — I can probably name just about everyone in my 100 person class, but that’s hardly a fair comparison)—can’t GW name just one or two he trained with?

This is a devastating point, particularly in Bush's case. George W. Bush is in many respects not a smart man. But everyone agrees that he has one great skill: an extraordinary memory for names and faces. (Earl Warren, a very different sort of Republican governor, had the same gift.) It is inconceivable, had Bush actually served in Alabama, that he would be unable to come up with the name of a single fellow guardsman who served with him.